Sleeping on my balcony

My balcony is large.

How large is it? Well, big enough for a double-sized mattress. How do I know this? Yes, you guessed it -- I slept out there on Thursday night!

And...it...was...great! In fact, I even got cold that night! Yes, shocking!

Fortunately, the balcony is designed such that people on the street below can't see up to where I'm sleeping. So it's only people on surrounding buildings that live on higher floors who could look down on me. For the sake of not scaring folks, I wore pajama pants and a T-shirt.

More about the apartment soon! I love it and will post pics soon, I hope!

Water Usage

Here's a bit of background for a future post or serious of posts that I'll be making. Several things lately have gotten me thinking about water usage, so I went looking for statistics.

Here are statistics on average water usage in the U.S.

I had to laugh when I saw this as part of the page:

--> A friend of mine saw a decorative sign with this advice in a neighbor's bathroom: "If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, send it down."

Yes to High-Speed Internet

Well, it looks like the next time I'm online, it'll be from my apartment with the high-speed Internet from across the street. God willing, it'll happen at 3pm Tuesday afternoon.

I'm in Cairo for a few things this weekend, including an event at the American University to raise awareness about the situation in Darfur. Similar events are happening all over the world today and you can read more about:

Global Day for Darfur

and

Save Darfur.org

Hand-powered flashlights

Bought a couple of hand-powered flashlights at a monastery gift shop during my trip.

I kinda figured I'd be able to find something similar on Ebay, but this flashlight is exactly like 1 of the ones that I got! These are a really good idea, unless you want to sneak up on someone!! *laugh* With my little cheap ones (I paid less than $2 USD), you have to constantly be squeezing and releasing to generate the power, which results in a "whirring" sound. Mine have small watch batteries inside (despite saying "no batteries"), but you're not able to charge them. They work with a separate switch, like any normal flashlight would.

Here's a longer list of similar items on Ebay and I also found these nicer models on another site.

Has anyone seen more sophisticated/expensive versions? Opinions?

My New Apartment and Fast Internet?

Things in my new apartment are great! It's a wonderful place, less than 5 minutes from where I teach my English classes! I have most of my things moved over, so the place is a mess. I'm waiting until I get things put away before I take pictures.

So for now, you have to be satisfied with more photos from my trip!

Conveniently located across the street from my apartment is a nice Internet cafe'. In fact, I'm sitting there as I type this. I talked with them the first day I came about possibly getting a connection run up to my apartment, like other people in surrounding buildings have (it's obvious from the spiderweb of cables running away from the Internet cafe').

The price is decent, so I wanted to check the connection speed. I explained this to the nice guy who runs the place and he agreed.

So...I went to various "Internet Speed Test" websites. Here are the results:

BandwidthPlace -- 343.8 kbps (296 on second try)
CNET Speed Test -- 217.1 kbps (258 on second try)
McAfee Speed Test -- 150 kbps (150 again on second try)
SpeakEasy.net Speed Test -- 616 kbps (422 on second try)
PC Pitstop Speed Test -- 130 kbps (176 on second try)

What accounts for the variation? I think it's that some of the sites allow me to download from a site in/near Egypt, while others are only from America (and come up with slower results)

All in all, I think it's pretty good. From the looks of things, the Internet Cafe' is mostly frequented by kids playing networked computer games. There are only a couple on websites, so that means that I'll mostly be sharing the connection with my neighbors. Once I get the connection in my apartment (I'm pretty sure I'll get it), I'll do a bit of trial/error to see when people are home/downloading and when I get faster speeds.

Cool!

Comparing Book Collections

One of our new/returning MCC volunteers is a writer and keeps up on book-related topics much better than I do.

So, when he says "I found this really interesting site" (in a way that only Keith can say this sentence", I listen! *smile*

The site he pointed me to is LibraryThing -- basically, you create a list of your books (for personal or public use) and then your list is compared to all the other lists from other people who use the site. Based on similarities, the site tries to predict other books you might like. You can go deeper than this, but that's the short version of what you can do.

Give it a try!

My friend the Geek

I have a friend who is a geek. He now owns a Bluetooth Virtual Laser Keyboard. Can you guess who this friend is? (please post in the Comments)

I love a bargain!

As many of you know, I love bargains!

On this recent trip, we went to monasteries all around Upper Egypt, to Luxor Temple in Luxor, and then to beaches near the city of Hurghada on the Red Sea.

When we went to Luxor Temple, my friend decided that it would be funny to them to try to get me in for the Egyptian price.

Here's how the pricing structure breaks down:

Foreigners: 35 Egyptian Pounds
Foreign Students: 20 Egyptian Pounds
Egyptians : 2 Egyptian Pounds

So...they just bought the ticket for me along with the rest of the group and then pushed me into the middle of the mass of people as we went through. *laugh*

The pic is of me holding the ticket and of the price list on the sign!

More pictures?

Well, I had intended to upload a bunch of pics tonight, but Flickr seems to be having some problems. So...I'm heading for bed and hopefully they'll have the problem fixed so that I can upload in the morning before starting the move into my new apartment!

Oh heck, I guess I'll give you another picture here! This one is of my friend Michael's mother (on the right) and her 4 sisters! They were great to be around and did their best to feed us whenever possible!


And here's an odd pic of me. We were at Luxor Temple, so maybe the explanation is that I was temporarily possessed by the spirit of a long-dead Pharaoh?

First picture from my recent trip

As part of my recent trip with a large group of Egyptians from Tanta, a few of us took a side-trip which involved a nice boat ride, snorkeling, and relaxation. There were many foreigners on the boat, so it was very different from the other days on the trip!

The price of the trip was 55 Egyptian pounds (less than $11) which included mask/snorkel/fins and a very nice of salad, rice, meat, and fish. What a value! Something tells me that most of the other people on the boat didn't come for that price b/c they came on packaged tours!

Anyway, while waiting to board our boat in the morning, we looked around at other boats near ours. Look at the name of the boat in this picture. How would _you_ pronounce it?

Love and Marriage

Wait, wait, wait! Before you get too excited about this topic, it's a just a very general thing -- no specific ideas in my mind right now!

Ok, now that we've gotten that out of the way...

In our MCC group in Egypt, we have 3 young couples now, all under the age of 30. So this morning, one of the other single guys and I started talking about marriage and came to a question that neither of us could answer.

"What makes a successful marriage?"

The next time I see my married MCC friends, I will ask them this question, but for now I'm asking all of you! Please feel free to reply in the comments if you want to share with others reading this or email me personally.

New apartment

Well, I move into a new apartment tomorrow. I knew this was going to happen before I went on my big trip, but I didn't have time to Blog about it.

However, that's a good thing.

Why?

Well...b/c I'm not moving into that apartment -- I'm actually moving into a different apartment! Long story which I'll try to write out soon!